D! U! M! B! Everyone’s Accusin’ Me!

In an off-blog intra-ChicagoBoy email, Sylvain mentioned that in Ireland, where he is now, “If you agree with America on something, your IQ is assumed to be low – how else could anyone agree with something an American has to say?” It is regrettable that it in Europe it has apparently become automatically hip and expected to think the USA is stupid. Our boneheaded entertainment products are probably the biggest part of the problem. People abroad have a wildly incorrect idea of what we are actually about over here. Far from being a bunch of Rambos or J.R. Ewings or Pamela Andersons, we are a nation of people who work our asses off all day every day for what we have, who know that there is no (or not much) “safety net”, and who have to scramble every day to keep our jobs and to keep the kids fed. And we are a nation of people who take risks for money and risks to improve our lives and risks to be our own boss and risks to make a decent life for our families. And we are not a nation that looks at something bad going on with a shrug and resigned sigh, we are a nation that demands that things work right and if they don’t we demand that they be fixed, or we fix them ourselves. The Euros look at some fat guy on vacation in one of their decrepit countries, and they want to spit on the ground at the sight of the ugly American. That fat guy sits at a desk or is out on the road, and there is another guy a half mile down the street who will take his clients if he rests for a moment. He’s got a mortgage. He’s struggling to stay current and do what his customers need done. He may well have his own business, and he has probably more than once stared financial ruin in the face, and had to go home and smile for his kids so they didn’t know how scared he was. And if he is rich now, he probably didn’t start out that way. He may be fat, but he is not soft, not stupid, not lazy, he knows his business and he probably doesn’t have patience for idiocy. He’s probably a pretty faithful friend and good neighbor. And our hypothetical Joe American expects and demands that his government will destroy any threat to him and his wife and kids, his neighbors, his town, his country. That’s what it’s there for. That is the America I know. It might be good if the smart-asses in Europe did. Maybe a few of them would wake up. Then again, probably not. They are happier and more comfortable with their self-congratulatory lies. (Less excusable is the small but influential minority of American academics, journalists, politicians, clerics, movie actors and other self-appointed cognoscenti who have just as much contempt for most of us here in America. But that is a rant for another day.)

Categories USA

French and Germans Behaving Badly: Causes and Consequences

In recent, much-noted piece by Steve den Beste he argues with his usual force, facts and logic that the French and the Germans are opposing the (almost certainly) upcoming war with Iraq primarily because they are interested in hiding their deep involvement in Iraq’s secret armament industry. Ralf’s recent ChicagoBoyz post takes a contrary position, arguing that the domestic forces in play in Germany are sufficient to cause Schroeder to dig in against the U.S., and that the scale of German involvement in Iraq’s arms programs is not as great as den Beste suggests. Ralf notes that Schroeder is desperate to mobilize his left political base so he avoids catastrophe in the upcoming elections. (See this piece on Schroeder’s current sorry state.) Politicians do and say many irresponsible things when facing political death.

There are further explanations for the behavior of the French and Germans beyond those mentioned by Ralf, other than dread of being smoked out as Saddam’s covert arms suppliers.

For example, Schroeder’s and Joschka Fischer’s political ideology is a factor in what they do and how they verbalize what they are doing. In this eye-opening article, from the National Interest, Siemon Netto analyzes the world view of the “68ers” now in power in Germany, and describes their odd love-hate relationship with America. The “America” they fell in love with was the “anti-American America” of the ’60s era hippie and radical movements. These guys would find it very, very hard to support a U.S. led war, no matter how justified, both on a personal level, and because it would necessarily alienate their core supporters. Also, the Germans have worked so hard for so long at being pacifists, atoning vicariously for the Third Reich’s conquests and genocides, that they have a hard time getting their heads around any war (seemingly) voluntarily embarked on. This factor should not be downplayed. So, these factors may play a large part in Germany’s actions, whether or not it has had dirty dealings with Iraq which it wants to keep in the closet.

Arguably, if that were the primary element in Schroeder’s and Fischer’s position, it would make just as much sense for them to condemn those practices, air the dirty linen, blame their rightist predecessors, and make up for past sins by supporting the war.

As to the French, the simple explanations are probably the correct ones. They are clinging to a grand scheme of a united Europe in which they will play a dominant role. Opposing the U.S. seems to be the purpose of any such union, in their eyes, and they are pretty straightforward about that. To the French, for many years, foreign policy has consisted of reflexively opposing whatever the United States does, at least out loud, or as a public posture, and then actually doing whatever seemed to the economic advantage of France. This current situation apparently seems no different to them. Also, there may be an element of sour grapes for the French. I think they are miffed at us championing Turkey for EU membership. They know and we know that the reason we did that was to strengthen our relationship with Turkey at the expense of France and the Euro-federalizers. So, the French may figure it is their turn to jam a stick in our eye. (ChicagoBoyz’ own Sylvain, who knows more about France than I ever will, is dubious about major French involvement in Iraqi WMD.)

Yet another facet of the odd and offensive behavior of Chirac, Schroeder and their henchmen is captured nicely by David Warren:

The North American media are if possible overplaying the soap operatic performances of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, as they strew thumbtacks along the road to Baghdad. If you turn to the European media, you see that the French and Germans themselves hardly take their leaders so seriously. They are used to this kind of cynical posturing, and it doesn’t make the front page. What scares them is rather the American earnestness, the possibility that Mr. Bush means what he says. They expect politicians to lie to them — it is part of the “social contract” as in Canada — and when one of them starts putting his money where his mouth is, they are naturally alarmed.

In other words, the French and German elites do not take themselves seriously, their voters do not take them seriously, and everybody knows that their words are gestures, play-acting, to be taken with a wink and a shrug. This may be correct. I guess this is the kind of thing over-educated people in the States mean when they say that the Europeans are better than us at dealing with “complexity”, “nuance”, “ambiguity”, etc. That kind of crap may be OK when all you are arguing about is the size of the agricultural subsidy, or how big and what shape cheese packages have to be to comply with EU regulations. But to deal with the actual cement-floor basics of statecraft, like deciding to wage a war when it has become necessary, this puppet-theatre model of leadership just won’t cut it. In other words, Chirac and Schroeder are misplaying this because they are out of their league when there are serious issues to deal with.

This is essentially the same argument made by Robert Kagan in his justifiably famous essay Power and Weakness, about the trans-Atlantic gap. Kagan argues that the U.S. still lives in “history”, where tough decisions have to be made, while the Europeans, under the U.S. security umbrella, have the luxury of living after “history”, where all is merely administrative detail and someone else keeps the wolves from the door. Such post-historical politics is all the French and Germans know how to do anymore. Worse, they think this is all that politics and political leadership consists of, categorically. They don’t know what to make of the real thing when they see it.

A final factor is plain fear. The French and Germans have shown themselves to be totally unable to deal with the massive influx of muslims into their countries. They are unwilling and unable to assimilate them. Their stagnant economies are unable to provide jobs, and their lavish welfare states allow the small minority of genuinely bad actors to subsist in their midst. (This strong article by Theodore Dalrymple is in part on point). They have allowed themselves to become havens for crime and terrorism. They want to be able to keep ignoring this festering reality. Their official and unassailable leftist ideology won’t even permit realistic discussion of these problem. (This stifling of legitimate debate has given rise to people like Le Pen, people who don’t care about preserving the decencies, and ordinary people can find no one else who will talk about the things which worry them most.) Most of all, the leaders of France and Germany live in mortal dread of terrorism in their own countries. They fear, with some cause, that a major war in the Middle East may lead to all kinds of horrors right at home. They would rather keep whistling past the graveyard than actually come to grips with all this. And they are furious at Bush for forcing all this onto the front burner.

So, the French and Germans are not adopting postures of opposition to the Bush juggernaut because they are an evil cabal with a lot to hide. At least not primarily. They are acting this way due to their own atrophied ability to function as real countries confronting serious challenges. They are also in the grip of leftist ideologies which consistently lead them to misread the world and its dangers, and to make stupid decisions. And they are afraid. Their elites also despise the United States generally and W in particular. They can’t take him or us seriously. These factors are the main ones driving their obstructionist policies.

Instapundit had a link to this excellent post by Trent Trelenko. Trelenko focuses on the conduct of France and Germany, and notes, as does den Beste, that this conduct may lead to an angry American response. There is certainly a growing animus in Blogspace, for sure. But so far it is a jeering, irritated animus, not true anger, and certainly not real hatred — the “Axis of Weasels” is not language directed at people truly perceived as enemies.

It is too soon to say whether what goes on in the rarefied world of the blogosphere will come sally forth and take up residence out in the rest of non-cyberspatial America. I tend to think not. Only a small proportion of the population are glued to the internet and television news and all on edge about the upcoming war. (Not many people are typing blog posts late at night on Saturday about all this, for example.) Meanwhile virtually the entire country focuses on the Superbowl and is only fractionally aware that anything big is going on with Iraq, or that a major war is about to start in a few days or weeks, or that Bush is going to, you know, do, like, whatever. So, where den Beste apparently anticipates an outpouring of Jacksonian anger about all this, I think that is still only a possibility.

Now, I am (by and large) a Jacksonian myself, and I think den Beste’s analysis of the Jacksonian response to all this is astute, so far as it goes. But it is also noteworthy that Jacksonians are slow to anger. There is a lot about the rest of the world that they simply don’t give a rat’s ass about, anyway. They need to really have a reason to focus on and care about any foreign country at all. They seem to have bought into getting rid of Saddam, as a villain, as a long-time enemy, as a guy we should have killed a long time ago and, most of all, as a threat to our oil supply. Assuming there is a war, and we win big, and win quickly, the final take-away for Joe and Jane Minivan, your typical crabgrass Jacksonians, may be simply, “the French and the Germans? What do they have to do with all this? Who cares what they think?” And that may be all to the good. It need not mean “the end of NATO” for example. That now pointless entity will continue to limp along. After all, bureaucracies rarely ever really die. We will continue to trade with Europe, and have military bases there, and nothing dramatic will necessarily happen. They’ll loathe us a little more, and we’ll ignore them as we do now.

However, if this French and German perfidy ever does penetrate the Jacksonian consciousness, there will be anger, and a sense of betrayal, and this will indeed have long, and lingering effects on any attempt by the Europeans to patch things up. For example, the war could go badly, or takes a long time, or lead to larger than expected casualties, or there could be attacks on Americans in Europe either by Europeans protestor-types, or muslims living in Europe. And if the Europeans adopt the wrong tone in these circumstances, the American public will notice. And if that happens the French and the German political elites will come to realize that they have made a disastrous miscalculation even appearing to side with the enemies of the United States. How exactly this Jacksonian anger would work itself out in actual policies is not clear to me. Outright war is not an option. But a mutually destructive trade war could be one consequence.

This potential is apparently absent from the political calculations of Chirac and Schroeder. They are focused on domestic consumption. If they consider their effect on American opinion at all, they seem to be doing so based upon their domestic political experience, rather than from a grasp of American political realities. But they ought to try to understand us better. Jacksonians do take honor seriously. (They don’t put it in quotations marks, for example.) And that means how they are viewed by the world at large, i.e. as meriting respect or not, not some subjective sense of worth. Chirac and Schroeder should not lightly dis America.

Another factor which den Beste does not mention, and which actually supports his point, is also worth noting here: Jacksonians tend to believe in conspiracy theories. They have for centuries believed that there is a foreign locus of evil which is manipulating us and leading us astray and infiltrating our institutions and corrupting them. First it was the Vatican, and in some circles it still is. Then, it was the Kremlin. Also, intermittently, it has been the Trilateral Commission and the East Coast business and political elite. But since the end of the Cold War, there has been no focus for this type of thinking, and the locus of worldly evil has not settled anywhere definitively. The United Nations is a perennial contender, except its blatant incompetence makes it implausible as a manifestation of Anti-Christ.

(Nonetheless, let me share an aside. I recall a perfectly rational-seeming man in a Kinkos in Lafayette, Indiana. He was photocopying part of his own translation of the Bible. He mentioned casually that there were stickers on the back of road signs, and these were coded to maps which were going to be used by the U.N. Blue Helmets that Clinton was going to bring in. The concentration camps had already been surveyed up in Michigan, for the arrestees in the Midwest. All registered gun owners were going to be arrested first. He was not going without a fight.)

Another low-level candidate as a focus of Jacksonian conspiracy theorizing has long been the European Union. I once saw an episode of the extraordinary and, in its own insane way, brilliant TV show This Week in Bible Prophecy. The program noted that the EU was using the symbol of Europa riding a bull, on a proposed euro note I think. The host of the show explained that this symbol was in fact predicted in the Book of Revelations, etc. If the EU becomes more widely accepted on the crackpot fringe of Jacksonianism as the seed-bed of foreign evil, the French and the Germans will have all kinds of extra trouble on their hands any time they have to deal with the United States.

In conclusion, if I had to take bets on where we will be in six months, I’d say that (1) Iraq will have been conquered, (2) nothing about French or German involvement in Iraq’s armament will have emerged which is very major or very novel, (3) United States relations with Germany and France will not be warm, but will not have undergone any very major changes, (4) NATO will continue to fade in importance, but will continue to exist de jure, (5) the U.N. will continue to exist and everyone will act like nothing big happened, even though that institution may continue to decline in importance and influence. I don’t think there will be a Jacksonian backlash against “Old Europe”, as Rumsfeld dismissively calls it, unless there is an unanticipated turn for the worse in the war, or other related disaster, and the French and the German politicians badly misplay their public response to it.

Nothing in the foregoing should be taken as an excuse for the French and the Germans. They are acting like weasels, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Liberation or Law Enforcement?

I am noting more and more that commentators on the ongoing showdown with Iraq are talking past each other. First, let us dismiss out of hand the Chomsky/Sontag types, and the decrepit human detritus of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, which is enjoying a moment’s febrile nostalgia before finally withering away. No, that is not it. The intelligent question is whether, given that America has interests at stake, what are those interests, and what should we do to achieve them? The Bush administration is not helping much, because, while it focuses on disarmament, and refers to compliance with the U.N.’s resolutions, the strong sense one gets is that it has larger ambitions, operating under the code phrase “regime change”. For the former, enforcing U.N. resolutions, something as minimal as a deal with the existing regime could, conceivably, suffice. For the latter, nothing less than conquest and occupation of Iraq and reconstruction along the lines of Germany and Japan after 1945 will do. In their much-cited essay “An Unnecessary War”, arch-realists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt offer an analysis which basically concludes that Saddam is not entirely irrational, and that he can be contained and deterred, even if he obtains nuclear weapons, so a war is unnecessary. This piece, like everything by Mearsheimer is relentlessly logical and vigorously argued. I had the good fortune to be an undergraduate in two of Mearsheimer’s courses, and I learned a lot from him, most of which I still think is correct. Right or wrong, he is a serious and hard-nosed thinker. Mearsheimer and Walt set up the argument this way:

The belief that Saddam’s past behavior shows he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and faulty logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively-even if Saddam has nuclear weapons-just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Regardless of whether Iraq complies with U.N. inspections or what the inspectors find, the campaign to wage war against Iraq rests on a flimsy foundation.
Mearsheimer and Walt then proceed to make the case that Saddam is no less deterrable than the old Soviet Union, i.e. he cannot use nuclear weapons, nor can he blackmail anybody with them, because he would invite annihilation if ever tried to use nuclear weapons. They are a little less convincing in arguing that Saddam would not “hand off ” a bomb to a terrorist. They conclude as follows:
… Both logic and historical evidence suggest a policy of vigilant containment would work, both now and in the event Iraq acquires a nuclear arsenal. Why? Because the United States and its regional allies are far stronger than Iraq. And because it does not take a genius to figure out what would happen if Iraq tried to use WMD to blackmail its neighbors, expand its territory, or attack another state directly. It only takes a leader who wants to stay alive and who wants to remain in power. Throughout his lengthy and brutal career, Saddam Hussein has repeatedly shown that these two goals are absolutely paramount. That is why deterrence and containment would work.
If the United States is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq, Americans should understand that a compelling strategic rationale is absent. This war would be one the Bush administration chose to fight but did not have to fight. Even if such a war goes well and has positive long-range consequences, it will still have been unnecessary. And if it goes badly-whether in the form of high U.S. casualties, significant civilian deaths, a heightened risk of terrorism, or increased hatred of the United States in the Arab and Islamic world-then its architects will have even more to answer for.
This article has been the most powerful assault on my pro-war position yet, and my summary does not do justice to its force. It took some mulling before I rejected it. First, my reading of Kenneth Pollack’s book, The Threatening Storm, suggests to me that Saddam is more a lone dictator than was the leadership of the old Soviet Union. Hence, whether he himself is personally sane or not is in fact relevant. And I’m not sure Saddam is so clearly a “rational” actor within the realist framework that Mearsheimer and Walt operate in. Nor do I think Saddam’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would be such a non-issue in our dealings with him and with other countries in the region. Mearsheimer and Walt seem to hold a view not held by others in the region. Whether possessing nuclear weapons is practical or symbolic, Saddam wants them, and other people in the regime seem to be afraid of him having them. Mearsheimer and Waltz even assert that a “Desert Storm II” could be waged even if Saddam possessed nuclear weapons:
… If Saddam initiated nuclear war against the United States over Kuwait, he would bring U.S. nuclear warheads down on his own head. Given the choice between withdrawing or dying, he would almost certainly choose the former. Thus, the United States could wage Desert Storm II against a nuclear-armed Saddam without precipitating nuclear war.
I do not find this convincing. I don’t think the United States would mass conventional military assets where a desperate or irrational Saddam or his successor could use a nuclear weapon on them. Iraq would likely perceive such a force as an existential threat, and the United States would not perceive even an occupied Kuwait as an existential threat. No administration would put American soldiers and sailors in that degree of hazard. Saddam possessing nuclear weapons would nullify America’s advantage in conventional military power in the region, and I find the contrary argument unconvincing. Our willingness to threaten annihilation against Soviet Russia turned on their ability to do the same. And the political will to maintain that stance was barely adequate to last out the Cold War. We could not muster the will to make similar threats of annihilation against any lesser foe. That is my take on American political reality, and I’ll stand by it. Finally, even on their own terms, let us take Mearsheimer and Walt’s rationality postulate and turn it around. If Saddam is rational, and if possessing nuclear weapons is such an obviously self-defeating proposal, why has he risked his regime and his life to obtain them? Political Scientists of the Realist school remind me of certain kinds of economists, who tell you why what everyone on earth thinks is the case is wrong. Still, everyone carries on pretty much as before, and sometimes more sophisticated social science models emerge later, and, by Jove, what everybody thought all along actually made some sense. I won’t discuss Jonathan Pollack at length, but at the end of the day, his arguments in The Threatening Storm on the possibility of containment or deterrence are more convincing than Walt and Mearsheimer’s. And his book is subtitled The Case for Invading Iraq. (Read it if you haven’t yet.) Despite all the foregoing, Mearsheimer and Walt have put their finger on a critical point, which is that the United States needs to more convincingly present a “compelling strategic rationale” for an attack on Iraq. That compelling strategic rationale goes beyond disarming Saddam. It is the creation of a more peaceable and orderly region, with Iraq as the test case. In other words, the goal should be to conquer Iraq and drag it kicking and screaming into the world of democracy, rights, capitalism, etc. to the maximum feasible extent, along the lines of what we did in Germany and Japan 50+ years ago. (Incidentally, the Realist case is that the type of regime is irrelevant to whether wars break out or who wins them. A recent example of this is Democracy and Victory, Why Regime Type Hardly Matters by Michael C. Desch. I have not yet done more than skim the Desch article, but it looks like it is worth the effort.) Any number of commentators have been calling for just such a “maximalist” American engagement. I recently had the chance to read the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Fouad Ajami’s essay Iraq and the Arabs’ Future is one of the best arguments I have seen for the maximalist strategy. Ajami lays out the options:
For American power, there are two ways in the Arab world. One is restraint, pessimistic about the possibility of changing that stubborn world, reticent about the uses of American power. In this vision of things, the United States would either spare the Iraqi dictator or wage a war with limited political goals for Iraq and for the region as a whole. The other choice, more ambitious, would envisage a more profound American role in Arab political life: the spearheading of a reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point, and beyond Iraq lies an Arab political and economic tradition and a culture whose agonies and failures have been on cruel display.
Ajami argues that the transformation of Iraq will be a major undertaking, but that it is not a pipe dream. He contrasts Iraq with Egypt and Saudi Arabia:
Iraq may offer a contrast, a base in the Arab world free of the poison of anti-Americanism. The country is not hemmed in by the kind of religious prohibitions that stalk the U.S. presence in the Saudi realm. It may have a greater readiness for democracy than Egypt, if only because it is wealthier and is free of the weight of Egypt’s demographic pressures and the steady menace of an Islamist movement.
Ajami concludes:
Any fallout of war is certain to be dwarfed by the terrible consequences of America’s walking right up to the edge of war and then stepping back, letting the Iraqi dictator work out the terms of another reprieve. It is the fate of great powers that provide order to do so against the background of a world that takes the protection while it bemoans the heavy hand of the protector. This new expedition to Mesopotamia would be no exception to that rule.
So, the big problem, which Mearsheimer and Walt poke hard, is that the Bush Administration’s articulated reasons for the war are, arguably, insufficient for the risks and costs it is apparently willing to incur. My suspicion, and that of many others, is that the “limited aims” asserted by the Bush Administration are a mask for a more visionary and much more risky policy along the lines Ajami (and many others, usually less eloquent) suggests. In other words, the Bush administration’s actual goals are not the same as those articulated in its “declaratory policy”. (Further evidence can be found in the National Security Strategy published by the Bush administration, which hints heavily that it has ambitious goals, e.g. to “champion aspirations for human dignity” and to “expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy”. ) I don’t know what the Bush administration really plans to do. I don’t know if it knows. I find unusual Wilsonian stirrings in my breast. I feel a growing suspicion that there is a higher realism than the heartless physics-like modeling of systemic determinism, however valuable and accurate that type of Realism may frequently be. I fear that a mere “police action” in Iraq will settle only minor issues, and temporarily, and open us up greater dangers. Ultimately, Ajami’s analysis is more convincing than Walt and Mearsheimer’s – though they don’t really address the same concerns. If some hope and progress are not realized in the Muslim world, even if initially at the point of an American bayonet, and if America does not break with its habit of supporting and sustaining convenient tyrants in the Muslim World, then far worse disasters await us. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, not at this point inevitable, will become more and more likely. The next few weeks and months will be terribly important ones.

Fireside Bowl, Nerf Herder, The Eyeliners

Many New Yorkers live their whole lives in one of the five boroughs and never visit the Statue of Liberty. Many Parisians never visit the Eiffel Tower. Similarly, I have spent many years in Chicago without, until a few weeks ago, setting foot in the legendary Fireside Bowl. (and here and here). One of my coworkers, a regular, described the Fireside as “the last of the great punk dives.” It really is a bowling alley, with the lanes roped off, and a stage at one end of the back wall. It’s truly amazing claim to fame is that it has exclusively all-ages shows. (The bar is a cordoned off area, which you need ID to get into). Perhaps even more amazing is its survival in the face of the City of Chicago’s quiet but clear determination to make it go away. A gentrifying neighborhood may ultimately finish it off. But there it stands, for now. My visit occurred fortuitously. I was looking for Christmas presents on the cool Interpunk site, and I stumbled across the inventors and still champion practitioners of “Nerd Rock”: Nerf Herder. It turned out that Nerf Herder are pretty darn good, they have a bunch of catchy songs (“Vivian” is my wife’s favorite), a great pop/punk rock sound, and some funny videos. (Click on the guys in Star Trek shirts for the video of “Mr. Spock”). The downside is that they have painted themselves into a corner with the lonely-guy-as-pervert business, sometimes pushing it way too far into the “not funny anymore” category. But, that is a big part of their shtick and I guess they are stuck with it. (They reminded of the Simpletones, who had similar dorky lonely guy themes and singing.) (Moreover, Nerf Herder’s singer, Parry, mentioned in an interview that “we are big fans of The Muffs” — so I like them a little extra for that, too.) Best of all, I noted that Nerf Herder were going to be playing in Chicago in just a few days! So, the wife and I, instant fans, decided to get a babysitter and go. It was a very good show, and the Fireside, far from being a “dump” was run-down but cozy. It is like a neighborhood pub, almost. I had a good chat with various strangers at the bar, describing now defunct punk dives of a bygone era 15 or so years ago. And, get this, the bathroom was clean. That is always the sign of someone actually caring about the place. Everyone was there because they were into the music. Nerf Herder put on a solid, well-rehearsed show. Parry, the singer, is a great showman. (The guys from Nerf Herder are from California, and they looked COLD in Chicago. The guitar player was selling cds and stuff before the show and he said he’d never owned a pair of gloves before this tour.) This site has a bunch of good photos of Nerf Herder, including a bunch from the Fireside show, here, and here. Half the place was singing along with much of Nerf Herder’s set. My wife and I were about the oldest people in the place, with lots of teenagers and other people who were in diapers when we were in bands. Some people were dressed like ordinary yuppies, like me, some totally in punk attire, and everybody was cool. Finally, the truly awesome Eyeliners are coming to the Fireside in March. These gals are doing a substantial tour. Check their site for the night they are playing in your home town – and put on your eye makeup and go.

War Movies II: “Combat Films”

This excellent article, “The Serpent’s Eye: The Cinema of 20th-Century Combat” from the current issue of Military Review has an excellent discussion of “combat films”, i.e. those dealing with “frontline fighting”, “the clash of rival infantryman”, as distinct from the broader and less precise category of “war movies.” A must read for fans of the genre.